After high school, there came this point where the Lord invited, borderline told me, this is the ministry school that you’re supposed to go to. And it was the summer after enrollment had already pretty much ended and I didn’t have any money. I filled out the application and I was one of the last people to get accepted into the school, but I still had no money. All this happened in the span of a few days. So that week, I went to church and a guy walked up to me who is a friend of my dad’s, and handed me a $500 check. And he just said, “Hey, this is no strings attached.” 

Then I heard the Lord say, go home and sell your motorcycle right now. And so I got in a car and drove back to my house after thanking my friend for the money. I drove home, got on my motorcycle, drove it out into the front yard, and we lived on this country road or it’s a 55-mile-a-hour speed limit. As I took the motorcycle out in the front yard, I put the kickstand down and I was gonna go make a sign with some words saying for sale. But as I’m getting off the motorcycle, a pickup truck slams on his brakes, and pulls into our driveway, he rolls down his window and says, “Hey, you selling that bike?” And I said, “Yeah.” He’s like, “How much?” And I said, “About 3500 bucks.” And he said, “Do you mind if I test drive it?” He drives it up and down the street and kind of haggles me down like 300-400 bucks, I sell the motorcycle on the spot, and he puts it in his truck. And so in the span of 15 minutes, I got a $500 check and like $3100 or $3,200 from selling this motorcycle and it was enough to pay for me to start the next two semesters of ministry school. 

And so I move, you know, to the east coast to go this ministry school where the leaders were known to be incredibly prophetic, you know, they had seen God move. I just wanted stories like theirs. I didn’t care about the piece of paper I might end up with if I graduated. I really wanted to be like these guys. It was after that first year of ministry school…Do you remember Hurricane Katrina? That was the year that hurricane devastated New Orleans. I heard that there is a group of kids who are going to get a pickup truck and just drive there and see if we can be of help. And so I asked to go and the next thing, the very next morning I’m in a pickup truck driving from Charlotte, North Carolina to New Orleans.

On the road, someone makes a phone call and makes a connection and finds out that we might be able to get to this distribution tent that’s getting set up. It’s a joint venture between a church and the Red Cross. And so as we’re getting closer to New Orleans, we’re listening to Heidi Baker’s testimony on CD, Heidi Baker, is this incredible missionary mama of Africa, in Mozambique. But this is before she’s famous, and it’s so long ago that it’s on a CD, her testimony is on CD. So we’re, listening to Heidi Baker’s testimony. And I’m being just lambasted by the presence of God, just listening to this woman’s story and her heart for the orphans and all these miracles. 

I say out loud in the truck as we’re heading to New Orleans “Lord, let me meet this woman.” And I was just thinking someday, someday I’ll meet Heidi Baker. And so we’re pulling into New Orleans and there are all these military checkpoints where they’re directing people away from New Orleans. We get up to these checkpoints, and we’re a bunch of college students and we would talk to these military guys and say, “We’re here to help, we’re looking for a distribution tent.” And they say, ”Go on through go on through.” We would see hundreds and hundreds of cars in front of us and behind us being detoured in a different direction and we are the one car being let through. That happens three times. We get through these military checkpoints and now we’re in the heart of New Orleans, and the devastation is insane.

We find this distribution tent where we are helping and I make friends with the guy who’s leading it. I noticed that there’s a box of these little Bibles. And I don’t have my big Bible with me because we’re out in the field doing work. And so I asked the leader, “Hey, can I have one of those, I’d love to just occasionally read Scripture throughout the day.” And he says, “Of course,” and so I grabbed this one right off the top of the box of Bibles. Throughout the day, I would look at it and just, you know, remind myself of the goodness of God and Scripture and then just go back to handing out goods to people. 

Once we get back to this, this church where we’re sleeping, I have my full-size Bible, which has the Old Testament, this little one doesn’t have the Old Testament, it’s just the New Testament Psalms and Proverbs. I’m reading through the book of Joshua and it gets to the scene where it says that the Reubenites and the Gadites didn’t want to cross the Jordan with the rest of Israel. And it made the Lord and Moses angry. And I was like, Ha, that’s so interesting. They didn’t want to cross the Jordan. I thought they all wanted to, they all wanted to get to the promised land, right? Like, why is it that these two tribes didn’t want to?

This is during the summer after my first year of ministry school. And in my second year of ministry school, the director of the school asked me if I would move to Dallas and help a man named Jack Deer. Help him with the prophetic ministry at his church. It was a great honor to be asked, but I didn’t want to move. I loved my ministry school. I wanted to stay there. But he wanted to get me a job at this church in the Dallas area. And so I went to bed that night, and I was praying to God about what I was supposed to do. Am I supposed to go to Dallas and leave this ministry school? 

I went to bed thinking about that question, and I went into a dream. And in the dream, it was more of like a vision, a Bible fell from heaven landed on its spine, and fell open. It was at the end of Hebrews and the beginning of James, which are consecutive books in the New Testament. But in between the two books was a blank page that was dancing. And it was almost like it was teasing me. I woke up from the dream, needing to know what was what the Lord trying to say between the end of Hebrews and the beginning of James. 

And so I grabbed this little Bible that I was given the day before and I flipped open to the end of Hebrews and I read those verses and I read the first couple chapters of James and obviously all really good stuff, but nothing’s like jumping out to me. And as I’m looking at the end of Hebrews, I noticed these markings down in the binding on the last page of the book of Hebrews. And I have to pull the binding apart because it’s a brand new Bible and I spread these pages and it says, NMV 32. There’s a misprint down in the binding of this one Bible. And I think Numbers chapter 32. 

I go to my full-size Bible that has the Old Testament. And I go to Numbers chapter 32. And it’s titled, The Reubenites and the Gadites. And I was reading from Joshua, the day before about the Reubenites and the Gadites, and now I’m in numbers and the chapter is titled, The Reubenites, and the Gadites. I read in there that the reason the Reubenites and Gadites didn’t want to cross the Jordan, was because they had such great relationships, on that side of the Jordan. They had all these sheep, they were thriving, and they didn’t want to, they didn’t think that the future unknown potential promises of God were better than what they already had. 

The Lord spoke to me and said, I want you to cross the Mississippi, and take land with your brothers. The promise to the Reubenites and the Gadites is that after you take land with your brothers and sisters, you can either stay on that side or move back to where you were. But you need to cross land on this journey, this quest. And that was the Lord’s word to me. And that’s how I knew that I was to move from the Carolinas to Dallas and so I had the confirmation that I needed for the next move of my life. 

Now we’re still in New Orleans handing out food after Hurricane Katrina. And then we get invited of all places, to Dallas by some of Lou Engel’s people. He was having this 40-day fast and prayer for revival hosted at CFNI and we got invited to come and help host it through some ministry connections. And so we continue our road trip because that’s what college kids can do! We’re just free. So we keep on driving to CFNI and this young man named Rick Pino is leading worship this one night, he’s a recent graduate of CFNI. No one knows of him yet, he becomes kind of a famous, incredible songwriter, and worship leader. 

He’s leading worship and the anointing is so thick in this library room at CFNI. I’m up by the worship band, they’re upfront on this little stage, and I’m on my knees, and I have my Bible open on the floor, and I’m weeping. And I hear someone next to me say, “Oh, my gosh, that’s Heidi Baker.” And I look over at the door and this sweet pretty woman has walked in, and I think to myself, that’s not what I thought Heidi Baker would look like. And then I went right back to worshiping. T

Then the Lord said, “You asked to meet her, didn’t you?” And then I thought, oh my gosh, it’s been just a few days since I’ve prayed that prayer. Heidi Baker walks in with Lou Engle and someone else and looks around the room, and the first thing she does is she walks straight to me. And I have my face in my Bible and Heidi, lays on top of me, wraps her arms around my belly, like a mom, and begins to whisper my prophetic destiny and identity into my ear as I am weeping into my Bible. She says, essentially, “I was sent here for you.”

I am no one, okay. I’m just the Lord, Son. I know, that makes me sound like something, but this is just exactly what has happened. There are two moments in my life when the presence of God was so thick on me that I had to ask him to stop because I felt like I was gonna die. That was one of them. That moment was so intense that I felt like I needed God to stay his hand so that I didn’t like evaporate. 

This Bible I’ve kept for 20 years because it’s just this cool, physical reminder and evidence that God speaks. And when I discovered this, this typo down this misprint down in the binding of this one Bible. I went back to the box of Bibles to see if other Bibles had the same misprint and they didn’t. I flipped through dozens and this was the only one that had NMV 32. It’s the one that I grabbed and it’s the one that the Lord spoke to me through in a dream that led me to the answer to know where the next several decades of my life would be spent. I’ve put down roots in Dallas and raised my family here. And even though it’s still so important to be led by the Spirit on a day-to-day basis, I can’t say enough about how important it is to put down roots when you know that you’re supposed to. It’s always fun to pull this Bible out and show it to my students or to the church as just another undeniable moment that I know God spoke.  

Probably the most important deliverance in my life, or the thing that I’ve needed to get freed of, is doing something great for God. Because I was I was trained to think, go, do great things for God save the lost, and do miracles. And I read books about the great men, the great things that they did. And then I realized that the people who did the greatest things for God in Scripture didn’t know that they were doing great things for God while they were doing great things for God. They were living their lives and following their passion and following the wind and spirit. 

David didn’t wake up one day and think I’m gonna write a banger worship song for Jesus today. He just woke up this one day, oppressed in his heart, and got honest with God and said, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Not knowing that one day Christ Himself would be hanging on the cross singing David’s worship song. Of course, we know that he wasn’t forsaken, the end of that psalm says you’ve not hidden your face from him.

Jacob knew that he had to dig a well, not knowing that one day Christ Himself would sit on it and save the Samaritan woman who saved her whole city. He didn’t know he was doing something great for God he woke up and followed his heart that day. Mary, when she poured out her perfume, she didn’t think I’m going to make Jesus smell good for the grave. She thought how can I love on Jesus extravagantly today? What if this is my last moment with Him? She poured out her perfume not knowing that Jesus would say, “I’m gonna smell like this forever.” And when you smell the fragrance of the Lord show up in a room, it’s Mary’s perfume. 

So God is a better leader than I am a follower and when I just submit, to being loved unconditionally by Him and live a life, within his affection, great things happen. I get to do something great with God every day instead of trying to do great things for God. I’m doing great things with God.